- The online account thing is annoying but really doesn't feel like a huge deal. Also, from other comments here it sounds like they made it truly optional. - Y

- The online account thing is annoying but really doesn't feel like a huge deal. Also, from other comments here it sounds like they made it truly optional. - You can absolutely add shortcuts to the start menu (and remove any default "advertising" ones). - My Computer is alive and well under Explorer. Removing the shortcut from the desktop by default isn't some conspiracy to frustrate anyone who dares be a power user; it's a visual cleanup done because a) most people never use that, and b) it remains easily accessible by other means. In fact, in several ways they seem to be catering even more to power users than they used to. There's WSL, Explorer got updated with tabs among other things, they're building that new open-source Windows Terminal, etc. It would really make zero business sense for them to tick off power users just for the sake of it, especially with how much effort they're putting lately into becoming the ecosystem for developers (VSCode, buying GitHub, etc). I think you're projecting a whole lot of personal anxieties into an operating system and making a handful of minor points of user-friction into something much bigger than it actually is.